Enforcer (39 page)

Ojacarcu opened his door and exited the car, bending down to look into the back seat where Connor was still frozen. He gave Connor a wave and thumped on the roof of the car twice before walking away, his laughter drifting in through the car’s open door. Vadim grinned, gave him a thumbs-up, then followed the boss into the cabin.

It took Connor three minutes to finally uncurl his fists enough to unlatch his seatbelt. He crawled across the seat and stepped out of the open door, taking a moment to look around. Darkness surrounded him on all sides except for the sky. The clear late October night had a slightly lopsided band of stars shining down upon him, the only other lights coming from the cabin and the dome light in the Lincoln. He shut the door and walked to the cabin, still expecting to die at any moment.

*****

Two short knocks were followed a second later by the door swinging open. The girl in the bed with him squealed and pulled a pillow over her bare chest, forgetting her lower half was naked and uncovered as well. Vadim looked in, gesturing to Connor to put some clothes on and follow him. The girl, he’d forgotten her name ten seconds after she told him, brushed her fingers across his arm as he rolled to the edge of the bed.

He dressed and left her alone, naked, and followed Vadim outside to the back deck. The view in the daytime would be breathtaking, Connor thought, noting the steep decline of hillside down to the invisible but audible river rushing through the rocks below. The lights along the back deck were muted, unable to penetrate the darkness more than a few feet beyond the redwood barrier that Ojacarcu leaned on.

The older man smiled at Connor’s approach. “Was she satisfactory?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Connor answered.

“She and her friends are new arrivals. They are visiting from Lithuania. They do not speak much English, which is not a bad thing, but they are very firm, very ripe, yes?”

Connor wanted to pick the man up and throw him over the edge to the rocky hillside below at the way he said
visiting
, as if the girls had been given any choice in it. The girl Ojacarcu had sent him off with was either afraid to speak, or spoke no English at all and elected to keep quiet because of it.

She looked like she was barely a month into her sixteenth year, a thought which bothered Connor immensely. That she’d most likely been deceived about where she would end up was disturbing, but that she might not even be an adult yet, was something he couldn’t get out of his mind. The girl hadn’t said a word, other than her name, but had immediately removed her clothes as if it were already a familiar habit in her young life.

Connor had removed his, but kept sheets between them, and when she attempted to do her duty, he’d refused, putting a finger across his lips in hopes that it was a universal gesture, even in Lithuania. He didn’t feel any better that he’d spent almost an hour trying to stare at anything but her naked body. She’d caught him numerous times, each time attempting to let him know she was ready and willing, but each time he’d gently push her away. He tried asking her how old she was, but her English comprehension was either nil, or she refused to answer. She might have already been trained or threatened to keep her mouth shut, especially when questions of age came up.

“She’s one I could keep for a while,” he said, pretending to have his hand on the back of her head at waist level.

“Ah, yes, she’s very skilled at that,” Ojacarcu chuckled. “Forty-nine thousand six hundred dollars.”

“What?” Connor asked, not understanding.

“Miss Gellner, she owes just under fifty thousand dollars. This is, of course, including her personal debt as well as Mr. Fallon’s debt. I do not care which of them pays me for Mr. Fallon, as long as it gets paid. She is seventeen thousand in the hole from her habit. Thirty-two thousand is the balance of Mr. Fallon’s debt.”

Connor tried to keep his breathing steady, his body relaxed. Fifty thousand dollars was an extraordinary amount, especially for a whore working under Ojacarcu. He doubted she would ever be able to pay off the seventeen thousand, even if she quit using tomorrow. Since that was a fantasy in her line of work, the seventeen would eventually grow to twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty by itself. Add in Larry’s debt, which would probably keep increasing slowly until Ojacarcu tired of him and replaced him with another dealer, and the debt became just a fancy way to say
slavery
.

Ojacarcu studied Connor once again, hoping to see what was going on inside of his head.

“That’s quite a bit,” was all Connor could force his mouth to say.

“It is just the tip, I’m afraid. Each week that passes costs her another one thousand dollars. I really should charge more, but she does make more than almost all other girls. Five hundred per week with interest for Mr. Fallon’s debt, five hundred per week for her habit. If I were a less kind man, I would charge her per day in interest and dope. But as I said, she is a good employee.”

Connor shrugged, hoping it looked genuine, feeling like the worst actor in the world. “I knew she was stupid, but I didn’t think she was that stupid.”

“She’s a drug addict, Connor. What else could you think?”

CHAPTER 32

Jera paced back and forth from the kitchen to the front door of Connor’s apartment. Connor had watched her for at least fifteen minutes, waiting for her to say something. She finally stopped in front of the recliner, looking down at him.

“I’ll never be free, will I?” she asked, her eyes wet, her face a twisted wasteland of hopelessness.

“That’s the plan,” he answered. “That’s how they get people locked in for the long term, until they are no longer useful. If you don’t go along with it, they hurt you. If hurting you doesn’t bring you back in line, they hurt people you care about.”

“Motherfuckers,” she said with venom. “So I’m supposed to do this until I’m forty? Fifty? Or will they ‘retire’ me at thirty when they bring in a new batch of Russian girls?”

He’d told her about his weekend at the cabin, which for him had been Sunday through Tuesday, since games ate up his Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Coach Lamoureux hadn’t been happy that he wouldn’t be at any of the practices, but when Mr. Ojacarcu requested something, no one argued.

She fell to her knees, draping herself over Connor’s legs, her head resting against his stomach. He let her cry for a while, running his fingers gently through her short black hair. He didn’t tell her how he’d screwed up by asking Ojacarcu in the first place, sure the man would know it for a weakness and use it against him at every opportunity, or at least whenever Connor balked at a task or didn’t perform it to the boss’ expectations.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said, raising her head to look at him. “I thought I was a couple grand in the hole because of the dope. He must be charging us five or ten times the street price, probably as a fucking ‘service fee’ or something. That I’m on the hook for thirty grand for that asshole Larry makes me want to stomp on his face with a boot until he’s dead.”

“No, you don’t want to do that,” Connor said, his fingers sliding through her hair.

“Why not? He’s fucking useless. Worse than useless, he’s keeping
me
in slavery. I’ve come to terms that I might have to do this another year or two, and I’ve accepted it as well as I can for now that this is what I’ve become, but honestly, Connor, I can’t do this for more than a couple of years.

“I
won’t
. I’m already scared to death that one day one of these assholes I have to fuck will kill me, whether on purpose or not doesn’t really matter. I’m scared that I’ll end up being replaced by a new girl, barely legal and no English, and instead of risking me becoming a liability, they’ll just ‘accidentally’ give me a lethal dose one day. What’s another whore dead from an overdose? That’s what everyone expects.”

Connor let her get her rage out, hearing the pain and the fear in her voice more than the fury and the hate that he knew resided in her. Hearing her talk about not being able to go on for more than a year or two made his own emotions begin to boil over. As wise as Petre’s words were, he was at the point he could no longer abide by them.

As far as Connor was concerned, people who made bad decisions didn’t have much to complain about when they found themselves in bad situations. When someone was put in a situation they had no chance of exiting, under any circumstances, he could no longer remain detached. Especially when it involved someone as complicated to his emotions as Jera. He wouldn’t admit he loved her, not consciously, but he was aware that it was true, as if it were a word on the tip of his tongue that he couldn’t remember.

“How much do you get to keep?” Connor asked her.

“Money? Two hundred dollars per week. That’s what we get. That’s what I get anyway. A hundred of that goes to Pavel or Ovidiu. They call it ‘rent and utilities.’ I thought I was paying rent and utilities by spreading my legs for them, but that’s what I get for thinking, right?”

“Do you keep the other hundred?”

“Sometimes,” she said, looking away. “For a while I was keeping it, and I had almost a thousand saved up, but there’s no place to hide it in the apartments. Ovidiu found it when they were doing a ‘routine’ inspection for ‘contraband,’ as if we were in prison and it was shake-down time. I had to pay the price of having contraband with Shannon. She’d been caught hoarding a stash of crystal. They accused her of trying to sell it on the side, to clients in the boss’ territory.

“I was given a choice of paying each of the men a hundred bucks to have sex with them, or I could use it to buy enough dope to keep Shannon and me cranked up while we had a marathon sex session with each other. The fuckers sat around and masturbated at least three or four times each in about four hours while watching us go at it.” Jera’s face became a mask of stony hatred when she finally looked at him again. “Do you know how hard it is to eat pussy for an hour straight while a bunch of hairy animals egg you on as they jerk off on your back or your face?”

Connor felt his face begin to burn, embarrassed at her description of what she’d been forced to do, but he was unable to completely scrub the image of her without clothes from his mind. He’d seen her naked more times than he’d wanted to, but he had always been able to keep his hands off her. At first it was because she was disgusting, the last thing he would ever want to touch. Now it was hard to resist his urges, knowing she would never refuse him. She had begged him a few times, becoming violent and calling him a faggot when he rejected her.

He was still disgusted by what she was, what she did, but because she was being forced to do it now, something had changed in him. He was sure it had to do with the Madonna-whore complex, a popular discussion in the locker rooms from his teens onward. She was no longer the dirty, verbally abusive, harpy-voiced prostitute he hated. She definitely wasn’t a saintly Madonna, but she was something more to him. He’d saved her twice. If the third time wasn’t the charm, everything he ever believed in would be a lie.

As a hockey player, superstition played a large role in thinking that the third time
would
be the charm. He’d lost Dana, he’d lost his own innocence when he watched Travis die, but he decided he wasn’t going to lose Jera.

“So you don’t have any money,” he said, not phrasing it as a question.

“I have a couple hundred bucks,” she said, and began to cry again.

“I don’t have anywhere near fifty thousand dollars,” he said, more to himself than to Jera.

“Connor, no, you can’t.”

“You’re right, I can’t. I only have about fifteen thousand saved up.”

“No! You can’t. I won’t let you. I’ve already fucked things up for you too much. I can’t let you down again. I know I will, it’s what I do, who I am.”

“Shut up,” he commanded.

“No! Let me go!” she cried out as she tried to rise, his grip on her arms inescapable. “Let me fucking go!”

“Shut up,” he repeated, louder this time. “Listen to me.”

Jera stopped struggling. Her cheeks were wet, her light makeup smeared in a hundred directions around her eyes.

“Do you love Larry?” he asked her, making her look him in the eyes.

“What does that have to do with anything?” When he said nothing, she answered, “No. I don’t love him. I thought I did. Even after you came and got me, I thought I still loved him.”

“Do you still love him?”

“No.” There was a finality in her voice. Connor let go of her arms and she moved into his lap. “He fucked me over for good. He never cared about me. If he did, he’d make an effort to see me.”

“Do you love me?” Connor asked softly.

She burst into tears again, unable to stop shaking even after she put her arms around his neck.

“I have a plan,” he said, running his fingers through her hair again.

*****

Dana sat next to him on the bench, both of them watching Niklas, Travis, Dracul and Jera skating around the ice. Everyone but Dracul laughed, sang, made fools of themselves as they constantly fell down. Her hand slipped into his, instantly warming it, the sensation traveling up his arm in a slow wave.

“She’s so beautiful,” Dana said with a smile, her voice exactly as he remembered it.